Isn't salary a proxy of how hard to replace one person or a group of persons is or how valuable they are?

There was a surge in demand for SWEs and scarcity brought salaries up. Are them too high? Hell no. On average, my colleagues and me generated ~2M$ each in 2025 for our company, while we get payed a fraction of that (grants and bonuses included). If you look at net income per employee we are at around 700k each in 2025.

Additionally, employers try their hardest to drive costs down (eg. offshoring as much as possible, everyone doing layoffs at the same time, ...) and average/median salaries remained high. If the salaries were overinflated those numbers should have came down I believe. The fact that they didn't makes me think that it still is a scarcity problem not an overinflation one.

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gruez a day ago | parent [-]

>There was a surge in demand for SWEs and scarcity brought salaries up. Are them too high? Hell no. On average, my colleagues and me generated ~2M$ each in 2025 for our company, while we get payed a fraction of that (grants and bonuses included). If you look at net income per employee we are at around 700k each in 2025.

So by that logic, housing in coastal cities also aren't "overinflated"? After all, like SWEs, they're they're also scarce and in demand. They're also providing enormous value to the people buying/living in them, otherwise they'd be living in Oklahoma or whatever and paying a fraction of the cost.

	▲	marcyb5st a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Maybe we give different meanings to the overinflation word. I see it as something that is speculative/shady in nature. Is housing overinflated? Probably in some places for sure because those who already have a house or invested in real estate wants to cut down supply to raise prices. Is the same on the job market? I don't think so. I never heard any SWE saying "let's scare people away from a CS career so we can bargain for higher salaries". The opposite is true though. Companies participate in career fairs, pre-uni events to make people gravitate towards a CS careers, ... so with a higher supply each employee loses a bit of bargaining power. Small excursus, this very fact was taken to the extreme in 2022 when everyone did layoffs at the same time despite the numbers being still great. If you put 300k people on the street at around the same time you can hire some of them for way less money as they now lost all leverage (since there are other 299.999 people waiting in line for a job).
	▲	B56b a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ya, that sounds right to me. Coastal city housing is very supply constrained, part of why it's so expensive, but it is hugely in demand and provides tons of value to many by letting them live near high paying companies. Unless by "overinflated" you mean a constrained supply/demand curve?